Diverse Energies

by Joe Monti Tobias S. Buckell

  In most squats, the strangers were so zonked out that their squatters could make them do anything, but Aakash’s strangers were a little more awake than most. They seemed to understand and accept that there were people living in their garage, but they’d also set firm boundaries; whenever Aakash tried to move into their house, he found that everything was firmly locked and secured. Aakash couldn’t risk what would happen if they decided to withdraw their unspoken invitation. No, the answer was the same as always. He had to move out. He had to find a new squat: a bug-free squat.

  So he called Victor.

  Victor always kept late hours. He answered the call immediately, “Hey there.”

  “I can’t take another day with these bugs,” Aakash whispered.

  “Stay strong. We’ll have our own squat soon enough.”

  “How? When? We’ve been looking for a year.”

  “It’ll happen.”

  “The new place will probably get the bug, too. Every place has them nowadays.”

  “Not our place. I’ll make sure of it. I got a surprise for you.”

  Aakash smiled. “What?”

  “I’ll show you tomorrow. Go to sleep. Make sure you rest up.”

  “I can’t sleep for shit. Come on, what is it?”

  “What, you really want me to ruin the surprise?”

  As they whispered back and forth, Aakash grew drowsy and finally fell asleep.

  He awoke when the garage door rolled up and let in a stream of morning light. A stranger — the man who owned the house — stood in the doorway, saying to himself, “Hold on. Hold on. I think I put it in the bin marked RADICAL SELF-EXPRESSION IN GROSSLY MATERIALIST CONTEXTS. ”

  Aakash glanced at his phone. It was 8 A.M. Victor’s last text said, Hope you’re finally asleep. I love you.

  Aakash’s mother ran forward and pulled sleepy Chandresh and Rishi out of the way as the stranger stepped into the garage. The stranger was walking blindly, using his fingers to manipulate keyboards and windows and graphical elements that no one else could see. Their visual implants allowed the strangers to see much more than was actually there, but it also meant they mostly ignored the real world.

  Bots — tiny tangles of wire — wriggled out of the stranger’s hair and radiated across the concrete floor, emitting low-powered zaps. One of the bots zapped a speck of dust. Aakash pulled out his phone, and it identified the speck as a bedbug.

  The stranger clattered through the junk in the back corner. Finally, he said, “Found it!” and pulled out a large machine.

  The bots wouldn’t go farther than three feet from the man, but when he passed Aakash’s bed, hundreds of them crawled into it. Aakash’s heart leaped.

  Aakash sucked in his stomach and tiptoed behind the man, trying to get within the bots’ range. The bug-killing bots leaped directly from the stranger’s hair onto Aakash. They crawled all over his body. Each time he felt a tiny static shock, Aakash sighed with relief.

  As the man left, Aakash tiptoed behind him. He was close enough to kiss the man. His mom and brothers were looking at him with shocked expressions. A half-dozen would-be squatters were gathered around the garage door with bedrolls and bags. They were clearly hoping the garage would empty out so they could snake the squat for themselves. A few of them laughed at Aakash’s absurd dog-step.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  The interjection came from another stranger: a teenager with the wispy hint of a beard.

  “Be patient, Joel!” the man said. “I just found the laser-saw.”

  “I wasn’t talking to you, Dad,” Joel said. “Can’t you see this guy riding your ass?”

  The man glanced back. His face was just a foot from Aakash’s. Aakash smiled but didn’t pull back. The bots were still working.

  “Oh, it’s just a street person.” The dad handed over the laser-saw. “All right . . . are you ready to reclaim your cultural heritage?”

  The son pulled Aakash back by the arm. “Jesus, give my dad some room,” Joel said. Aakash could hear the powered-up hum of the personal-defense system embedded in the son’s shirt. He was probably getting ready to unleash an arc of electricity that would shock Aakash into unconsciousness.

  “Don’t worry about him,” the father said. “The street people are harmless.”

  The father snapped his fingers, and the garage door started closing. Aakash shouted to his mother, “I’m coming in. I’ll stay today.”

  “No, no,” his mother yelled. “Victor will be waiting for you! You need to keep searching!”

  Aakash ran in and grabbed his bag from the high shelf, then rolled out and under the door. When he got up, the father and son were walking away.

  One of the would-be squatters standing by the garage door said, “I hate that kid. I can’t wait until he finally goes to sleep.”

  “At least he doesn’t ignore us,” another said.

  “Man . . . if they didn’t ignore us, how could we live with them?”

  Aakash looked at the pair. He’d seen them around, but he didn’t know their names. Aakash said, “C’mon, guys, what’re you waiting around for? Didn’t you hear? Our squat has the bug.”

  One of them said, “So what? My bedroll has the bug, too. At least you’ve got a roof.”

  Aakash shook his head. Someone had to stay behind to stop these guys from stealing the squat, but why did he always let his mom do it? His mom never got a break from being eaten alive in there. He knew he ought to slap on the door of that garage and make her hoist it up from the inside using the manual override. He needed to pull his weight and do his time. But then he felt the phantom touch of a bug crawling across his neck. He texted Victor, I’ll be there in an hour.

  As he trudged toward the bus stop, Aakash fell in with the tens of thousands of other homeless people who were wandering the streets of L.A.County. Every street corner was a marketplace. Street stalls sold crude handicrafts to the few passersby who looked as if they had any money. People delved into collapsed buildings, pulling out copper wire, aluminum coils, rags, and paper and piled their goods into shopping carts for resale at some distant recycling center. At red lights, children ran into the crowds of sleek, self-driven cars, begging the occupants for dollars until the lights turned green and they were stranded in the middle of the lane by the zooming rivers of cars.

  And every few blocks, crowds of hundreds of people surrounded a dispensary. With the bots, manufacturing was cheap and easy. Many strangers — acting singly or as part of organizations — had set up points of distribution to give away clothes, canned goods, shoes, prepaid cell phones, or whatever else they could program their bots to churn out. Aakash spent most days waiting in long, slow lines so he could accumulate something to take back to his family.

  Not today, though. Today they had enough food stockpiled back in the squat. Today Aakash was going to engage in the other major pastime of the streets. He was going to head up into the hills to look for a new squat.

  With their visual implants, the strangers spent more and more time in their own realities, so they didn’t much care what happened to their houses. Most of them weren’t as awake as the one who owned Aakash’s squat. Usually, a house’s owner was just a wired-up body lying in a bed, dreaming for twenty-three hours a day. So it wasn’t hard for a squatter just to move right into the spare rooms. Sometimes the owner even got carried down to a cellar or something if the squatters needed more space.

  But the owners were starting to die. And an ownerless house soon shut off; the electricity, the water — even the doors — stopped working. Eventually ownerless squats fell apart, and their occupants had to look for another place.

  And there weren’t many places left. In this part of the Hollywood Hills, there were more rubble-filled lots than upright houses.

  Aakash knew that his odds of finding his own place were pretty bad. Hell, some people would say that he was a fool for wanting to leave the garage. But he couldn’t stop searching for something better. Something clean and s
pacious and graceful: a place fit for a human being.

  Victor and Aakash never went to each other’s squats. Instead, they began their daily search by meeting in an abandoned steam pipe nexus underneath Griffith Observatory. To get there, Aakash passed through a long corridor whose wall was covered in frescoes of the exploding universe and whose floor was cluttered with food wrappers, broken bottles, and used condoms.

  The dark corridor was a popular meeting place. In one corner, two voices were whispering.

  One said, “We’re evaluating your kid today, aren’t we? You excited?”

  The other voice said, “I just hope he does his duty. Sometimes he seems a little . . . careless.”

  “I’m sure he’ll be fine.” A moment of silence, then “Should we clear out the street people before your kid arrives?”

  “No . . . he needs to learn how to deal with them.”

  Aakash kept walking. Lingering over someone else’s secret rendezvous was against the corridor’s etiquette.

  The temperature in the steam pipe room was more than a hundred degrees. Victor, stripped to his shorts, sat cross-legged on their mattress and gulped water from a plastic bottle. He rose and leaned forward to kiss Aakash, only to be pushed back.

  “No,” Aakash said. “I’m probably covered in bugs.”

  Victor’s smile threw strange shadows in the shaky light they’d dangled from an exposed wire. “So what? Now we both have them,” Victor said.

  Aakash said, “What if, in a few hours, we crack open a door and come up in an abandoned mansion! A place with running water and electricity and three thousand square feet of space. And what if, with our first footsteps, we infect it?”

  Aakash hung his clothes from a blisteringly hot steam pipe. Then he gingerly reached for the steam valve. The jet of steam had burned him once, but that’d been six months ago. He was more careful now. They had to heat the room to more than 120 degrees and then stand here for an hour to make sure the bugs died.

  “Wait!” Victor grabbed him by the waist and pulled him back. “You haven’t asked about your surprise yet!”

  Victor pressed an aluminum canister into his hand. Aakash held it up to the light. The aerosol can was covered in Chinese characters.

  “Pesticide? We’ve already tried everything. We have the chemical-resistant bugs.”

  “They’re not resistant to this,” Victor said. “It’s never been used in the US. It’s illegal here.”

  “Shit, then it’ll kill us.”

  “No, it’s just illegal because it kills birds or something. One treatment shouldn’t hurt us. In China, they spray this on kids to kill lice.”

  “Where did you get this?”

  Victor kissed Aakash. “I started looking for it on the day when you first told me your place had gotten the bug. You never blamed me, but . . . I felt so guilty.”

  “But you could use this on your own place . . . to help your own family. . . .”

  “No. This is for our new life. We’ll find a place, spray it up, close the door, and lock our troubles on the other side.”

  Aakash hugged Victor, but he couldn’t stop thinking about the closed door that his mom was locked behind.

  A light momentarily blinded them. A stranger had entered, holding a powerful lantern. He glanced at the nearly naked pair and rolled his eyes. The stranger dragged in a chair from the hall. Aakash and Victor stepped to the side of the room. The stranger flipped their mattress up into a corner, then he hopped onto the chair and examined the ceiling.

  “Hey,” Aakash said. “I think that’s the son of the stranger who owns my squat.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, I see him all the time. His name is Joel.”

  The teen looked down and said, “Can’t you guys swish it up somewhere else?” He pulled a machine from his bag and held it up to the ceiling.

  “Is that a laser-saw?” Victor whispered.

  “Keep it down!” Joel said. “This is hella dangerous.”

  “Umm . . . what are you doing?” Aakash ventured. He’d lived under the boy for years, but he’d never said a word to him before.

  “None of your damn business,” Joel said.

  Aakash whispered, “I think he’s trying to break into the observatory.”

  “Really?” Victor said. “By lasering through the floor? Seems like someone would notice. This guy’s going to go to jail.”

  “It’s Sunday. The place is closed and empty,” Joel said.

  “But there are guards,” Aakash said.

  “There’s one guard,” Joel said. “I’ve had cameras in there, watching him, for the past two weeks. We’re under the atrium right now. There’s an hour-long window when he doesn’t ever look into it.”

  Victor said, “Couldn’t this kid just —” but Aakash shushed him.

  “I bet I can get in there before you do,” Aakash said.

  “Sure . . . right. When the guard arrests you guys, that’ll be a great distraction. Now, can you leave me alone?”

  “If I get there first, you need to program your bots to zap your entire garage for bedbugs.”

  “What? You’re bug infested? That’s disgusting.”

  “Is it a bet?”

  “No. Of course not. What would be in it for me?”

  “I’m not some random punk. I know who you are. I know where you live.”

  “Sure,” Joel said. “My shirt is a Shield S400. It’ll shoot an arc that can lay you out before you —”

  “I think the cops might be pretty interested in what you’re doing.”

  “You wouldn’t. You’d lose your nice little squat.”

  “I don’t care. Those bugs are . . . I don’t care.”

  Joel’s face reddened and contorted. “Fine. Whatever. It’s a bet.”

  They hastily donned their steam-pressed clothes. In the corridor, Aakash bounced up and down and whispered, “Mom will be so happy! We’ll be bug free forever!”

  “Wow, that kid was a straight-up fool,” Victor said. “I guess strangers aren’t too used to having to think.”

  The hallway’s exit emerged from a fenced-off hill. They hopped the fence and landed in a silent park. Unblinking strangers peddled lazily on bikes that steered themselves. Some tapped on invisible keyboards as they rode. No one looked at Victor and Aakash.

  Strangers didn’t usually spend much time outside, but Griffith Observatory was a popular enough L.A. landmark that it managed to attract a few dozen visitors every day. Several strangers were sunning themselves on the grass. Some were walking virtual dogs that only they could see. Others were jogging or throwing balls. But all of them were seeing far more than Aakash and Victor could see. Their data displays were so dense and information rich that the world of grass and concrete and flesh was only a minor part of their visual field.

  When Aakash took a running start and leaped up onto the lip of the observatory’s first story, no one looked up. He gave a hand to Victor. They shinnied around to the front of the observatory and — in full view of almost fifty people — clambered up to the open slit of the dome. Then Aakash stepped onto the thin mezzanine that was just inside the dome. Below them, the guard was walking his rounds, but he never looked up.

  “This is nice,” Victor said. “I could def live here. Why did we strike this place off the list?”

  “It’s only two feet wide.”

  “Oh. right.”

  When the guard moved away, they dropped down.

  A floor tile rose, and a head poked up. Joel stood, then pulled out three gadgets. Aakash and Victor crouched down next to him. “Is that to, like, identify laser trip wires?” Victor said.

  Joel opened his mouth, closed it, and then nodded.

  Aakash laughed. “This place doesn’t have any laser trip wires.”

  “Well, it’s got them installed,” Victor said. “But I think the guard deactivated them. Too many false positives.”

  Joel pulled himself out, then handed his camera to Aakash. “Fine, you win. Just take so
me pictures of me, all right? I gotta prove I was here.”

  By the time they’d dropped back into the steam-pipe room, Joel was laughing. “Wow, you guys really schooled me,” he said.